The Fourth of July---our national meat grilling holiday---looms. Time to start planning your menu! But hey, all ye drought-concerned souls (yes, I'm talking to you, California): As you fill your shopping cart with charcoal briquettes, is your guilt reflex all a-twinge? I mean, eating meat is basically the worst thing you can do, right? We wanted some help thinking about this question, so we reached out to food writer Mark Bittman.
Bittman is a New York Times columnist, cookbook author, and creator of "Vegan Before Six"---an eating style that encourages saving food with animal products for dinner. He thinks and writes a lot about the connection between food policy, the environment, fair wages and human health. And as a California resident, he's done his fair share of thinking about how drought conditions factor into those connections. His takeaway? We all may need to just...chill out about the drought. And, yeah, make a few changes here and there.
I'm a lifelong Californian, I love my state, I'm worried about the drought and I want to think of myself as a responsible person. So...can I eat meat raised here?
Mark Bittman: Here's something that's weird to me. This spring when it was clear that the winter rains hadn't come and people really started to freak out, I was at a party and everyone was comparing their grey water savings techniques. And it seemed just strange to me and I said, "You know, it's not your fault! This drought is not because you guys aren't saving the water that you wash your dishes with." Now, using greywater is a good thing, but there are so many smarter things that could be done to ameliorate the water crisis.
Your question is spot on, because California is one of the largest meat producing states. [It's the fourth largest.] And it's far and away the biggest dairy producing state. [It's responsible for nearly a quarter of US production.] A lot of that water consumption isn't direct drinking water for cattle, but the raising of feed. And you need to feed a cow a lot to make it weigh 1,200 pounds.
[More than 600 gallons of water are needed to make just 6 ounces of beef, as explained by WIRED's own Brent Rose. A pound of cheese requires 381 gallons, while the same amount of butter uses 665 gallons.]
There is legitimate grass fed beef raised in California, and I think that's probably okay.
But should we even be raising meat in this state?
It's bigger than a California question. The real question is should we be raising as much meat as we do in the United States, and the clear answer is no. Not unless we can figure out how to raise it in a different way.
There are people who say we could actually produce as much meat as we're producing now on pastures and farms using more agro-ecological or more sustainable methods. What's pretty clear is that we shouldn't be raising meat in factories, the way 98 percent of our meat is being produced right now. It's an environmental, ethical, public health issue. There's a lot wrong with the way we produce meat now.
Life would be a lot easier for me if I could just trust the market to guide my consumption choices.
Yeah, but don't. A lot of people say, "We don't want market interferences." But farmers want assurances of price support and that's market interference. It just goes up and down the line.
You do have this odd meeting of the left and the right, both of which say, we need to stop subsidizing. The right would say we need to let the market do its work. But that's not happening. The left, and I, would say, if we're going to mess with the market---which we already do---let's do it so that it benefits a greater number of people.
Where do you see the biggest market failures?
Meat production may be the biggest thing. Food costs in general are way lower than the actual environmental and public health costs. We treat food resources as if they were inexhaustible. We fell into this habit when they seemed inexhaustible. Now we know we've learned this doesn't work, but we're not adjusting quickly enough.
It hasn't been talked about a lot, but really, the biggest cost of the way we eat right now, and the worst thing about our so-called food system, is the public health crisis. The government has not stepped up and said, "Our job is to protect people from dangers to their health." We have agencies that are supposed to do that.
Alright, right now I probably eat meat once a day. Let's say I accept I should have less, what are better choices?
Something from the plant kingdom really. If you eat meat seven times a week, and can cut it to six times a week, then your environmental footprint, carbon footprint, everything that is wrong with meat just declined by 15 percent. That's a lot, with just one meal.
What are your meat habits like? Have they changed?
Well I invented the VB6 diet [in which people eat as vegans before dinnertime]. I was a very strict follower of my own regime from 2007 until about 2013. Then I backslid---a well-known phenomenon when you're changing habits.
I guess for me it's a question of stability. If I feel like I have a home, if I'm not travelling all the time, then it makes it easy to have vegetables in the house, and for me to eat quite strictly for most of the day. I almost never cook meat at home. I cook a lot of fish (which has problems of its own, but that's another conversation I guess). Pasta, a small piece of meat and a salad seem to be where my home dinner habits have landed. And then when I go out all bets are off. I'm as bad as everybody else and whatever happens, happens. You have to be willing to fail if you're going to succeed and I recognize that.
Do you see any encouraging progress regarding how food works in the US?
I think the Obamas have done a pretty good job with school lunches. They worked hard on it, against really tough odds, and they did very good work on that. There's also the fact that people are talking about these sorts of things all the time. The fact that WIRED is doing a piece about this which, five years ago was so far from WIRED's bailiwick.
Though this isn't strictly about food, it's good to see campaigns like the Fight for $15 and the struggle of minimum wage workers get attention---that started with food workers. And when you see self-described foodies caring not only about the quality of ingredients, but also about how the people who produced that food are treated, that's a really encouraging sign.
